I very mugh disagree. If this last week is any indication...: - conservative side of the court dissenting when the SCOTUS threw out state and personal rights in favor of federal prohibition of medical marijuana
...and any residual respect I had for the intellectual integrity of Justice Scalia went out the window with his assent to that ruling. At least Thomas pretends to be a better libertarian/constructionist (unless civil liberties are the issue).
I put the term "fundamentalist" in quotes because it just doesn't quite seem to fit in that situation. Abolitionists were definitely religiously motivated, and were zealous about how their faith inspired their politics. Yet they were all for changing what had been the status quo for all recorded history, and the Bible certainly doesn't condemn slavery. Many of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement a century later were similarly inspired by a deep faith. There must be a better term than "fundamentalist" for such folks.
Maybe "fundamentalist" has just been tainted by modern association with strict sex & gender codes, instead of other teachings about, for example, social justice. Jesus was a (little-c) communist after all, among other things.
The classic examples are the abolitionist and utopian movements in the 1800s, both of which were born of Christian "fundamentalism". But it seems like fundamentalism is far more often associated with authoritarian reactionaries. The whole idea of fundamentalism is that the truth is already known, so any "progress" can only deviate further from that truth.
Sony won the Betamax case because they were pitching their product based on its non-infringing uses
Are you sure about that? I thought the legal notion of time-shifting as fair use came out of the Betamax decision. Which would mean that just about the only possible use for early VCRs was, at the time, illegal copyright infringement. And they were designed, sold, and marketed on the basis of that use.
IANAL, but Wikipedia's recap of the case says that Universal asserted that time-shifting was illegal, and as this was the primary use of the VCR, Sony should be held liable. Sony's defense was that it was fair use, so the question of holding them liable was irrelevant - and the court concurred.
Your "wive's" system uses swap because macs ship default with swap on. Turn swap off and watch it not use swap. Hard one huh? Windows works that way too. I run one of my XP boxes with a gig of ram w/o swap. Nice and zippy I just don't run 10 apps at a time. Learn a little about the computers you use.
Learn about the computers you obviously don't use, huh? Turning off swap on an OS X box sounds like an astoundingly bad idea. The OS caches everything plus the kitchen sink into RAM to speed access; turning off swap without changing this fundamental behavior is likely to lead to trouble, especially on systems without a gig of RAM. Moreover, since Apple really doesn't want you turn off swap unless you really know what you're doing, it's not as easy as clicking a checkbox in System Prefs. Try telling grandma how to do this.
The moral of the story is, use the system the way it was designed to be used, and don't talk anonymous smack about something you have no clue about.
5-4: One more conservative and it would have gone the other way. That's why the "filibuster the judicial appointments" battle - a warmup for the next supreme court opening - is so important.
I'd happily take a true libertarian on the court. But a partisan hack disguised in "conservative" clothes doesn't qualify. Yes, I'm looking at you, Mr. "States' rights and small government, unless it goes against the Republican Party agenda" Scalia.
Let's keep in mind the split on the interstate-commerce pot decision and on, oh, EVERY recent civil liberties decision before we ask for "conservative" judges to protect civil liberties and strict constructionism.
It's been before that the conservatives of today were the liberals of 30 years ago and that the liberals of today were the socialist party of 30 years ago.
That's absolutely absurd. It's much closer to the reverse. The socialists of 30 years ago are gone. Latter-day liberals are closest to the conservatives of 30 years ago, while the conservatives of today were the super-radical extremists of 30 years ago. If you look at the rhetoric, the liberals of the 50s and 60s were saying things that would make today's anti-WTO protester blush, while the rhetoric of today's mainstream conservative movement is almost verbatim from the radical reactionaries that no one (at the time) thought had any political future.
Actually they probably intend to make it easy to run XP in it. Thus they can advertise its dual-booting capabilities.
I wouldn't hold your breath on the advertising. Schiller said they "wouldn't try to stop" anyone from installing Windows, but that doesn't mean they'll make it easy, much less officially supported. And it just doesn't make sense for them to promote the idea of booting into another OS to the general public, when they're claiming the Mac OS is the soul of the company. So I think it'll remain a "stealth" feature to lure in yet more geeks-in-the-know, people already comfortable with the idea of dual-booting.
Can't tell you. That sort of thing is considered security information by the US Military. A few years down the road, however, I'm sure we'll be hearing from them.
Shouldn't we be hearing from all those veterans who served as junior officers in Gulf War I right about now?
One of the things I've loved about being a Mac user is the really great applications from small developers. Delicious Library, Adium, Transmit, Burning Monkey Solitaire, OmniGraffle; all great apps. While I'm sure that these great apps won't go away once we switch to Intel, I'm afraid they'll get lost in the dreck that's out there for PCs as things get ported over.
I don't think that'll happen, because the newer apps from small developers are the ones most likely to be Cocoa'd and "clean" - and easy to compile for OSX/Intel. Cocoa is a really, truly fabulous development environment for small-time devs, and part of why is that it's been letting coders get more and more abstracted from the nuts and bolts. And the more you use those abstracted APIs and strategies, the smoother things will be when you click that "Intel" button in XCode. So I actually think this whole transition will give nimble, small-time devs a leg up on their older, bloated, legacy-bolted competitors.
The dramatic drop in crime in NYC is an outlier compared to the rest of the nation, so it would be reasonable to assume that NYC had some kind of local effect which caused the deviation. In this case, I think Guiliani is the most likely cause. If you think it's somthing else, I'm open to suggestions.
Guiliani's probably as good an explanation as any for NYC's particular success. But the real question is why crime dropped everywhere, at about the same time. Emergency medicine didn't suddenly get 200% better everywhere, either:), and anyway couldn't account for the drop in all manner of crimes.
The other respondant summarized the logic, but there's also the timeframe that some folks see as suggesting a link. Abortion was legalized in 1973. Crime rates started dropping around 1990. 1990 - 1973 = ?
Bear in mind that most of the reduction in murders, from what I understand, can be attributed to better emergency practices which cause assault not to become murder because the victim doesn't die.
I can guarantee you that NYC emergency medicine didn't get 300% better between 1990 and 1998.
I am curious, though, how this line of reasoning would be made to apply to the concurrent 60% drop in rapes and the 75% drop in car thefts... No one has put forth a convincing explanation for the amazing drop in all manner of crime in the 90s, but the abortion argument is as strong as any other so far, and has the added bonus of not being primae facie absurd.
Joke aside, I don't really see the relevance of the story. MS has relationships with many governments, that the Vietnamese governemnt is now also among them doesn't strike me as exceptional.
Finally, I also don't understand what mentioning the human rights situation in Vietnam has to do with this article. Don't get me wrong, pointing this situation out is important, but why in this context?
This is an actual current-events story that somehow made it onto/.. It's was one of the top local stories yesterday, and even got a bit of play nationally. The story was: a) Vietnamese PM stops in Seattle for a day on his way to DC b) meets with Boeing and MS execs to talk trade, because he wants their help in lobbying Bush to support Vietnam's entry into the WTO c) local human rights advocates - and much of the (sizable) Seattle Vietnamese community - protested his every move in Seattle
There. It's not exeptional or striking, it's just what happened. [shrug] I suppose it's not every day that a foreign head of government visits Seattle and kowtows to local business leaders. That seems like news. I think it is interesting, that of all the places in the US to visit before hitting the White House, the PM chose Boeing and MS in Seattle.
This is a yes or no question. Yes I want to install them. No I don't.
It takes five seconds of programmer time to substitute "Install fonts" and "Don't install fonts" for "Yes" and "No", and the choices are now absolutely unambiguous. Any programmer with half a brain would realize those five seconds will save his users, not to mention his company's support folks, hours of time in aggregate - re-reading the text, undoing an undesired action, looking for help, etc. It's not a matter of reading the box, it's a matter of understanding what "Yes" and "No" mean beyond a reaonable doubt without feeling like you're taking the SATs again. People are using your program to do something, not for the sake of the pure joy of having figured out what the heck you meant when you wrote that box at 4am.
Longer explanation of why Yes/No just never works well: The box needs to be long enough to explain what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. For example, "Do you want to install 100 dpi X11 fonts?" makes absolutely no sense in isolation. Why is the computer asking me such an arcane question? You have to add the reason, like the GP did: "Your screen's fonts are of a really low resolution." For non-obvious questions like this, you also should explain why you might or might not want to choose either option: "Do you want to install 100 dpi X11 fonts? This will make the fonts look better, but you may want to not install the fonts to save disk space." Altogether, this makes a well-written and informative box, but it's long. Yes/No doesn't work after a paragraph. What part are you saying "Yes" to, anyway? But with verb-labeled buttons, it's instantly obvious. You can read and understand the text, and then don't need to waste any more time understanding which button does what. It's instantly, idiot-proofily obvious. That's good interface design. Yes/No works, barely, when the entire box is one statement, like "Do you want to save changes before quitting?" But even then, verb boxes are more efficient. With Yes/No, you need to read the whole thing very carefully, as carefully as the font example above, to make sure you aren't screwing yourself by instinctively pressing "Yes". If the buttons were labeled "Save" and "Don't Save", you can safely skim the box, recognize it's the same as always, and know that "Save" will do exactly that. Little things like that separate a good interface from an infuriating pile of slag.
But sometimes the user dosen't know which option is best. So perhaps the dialog should also have a button labeled "User is confused. Let the computer decide."
That's what sane default options are supposed to be for. Why you should never map an irreversibly destructive action to a default-key button.
A properly designed dialog box does not force the user to think about what the choices will actually do.
I think you were thinking the right way, but you just gave a perfect example of the ambiguity of language that can torpedo the Yes/No/Cancel paradigm.
It's not that the user shouldn't think about what the choices will do. Of course he should. That's the whole point of the box, to present options. (One of the repliers obviously misinterpeted your post in this way.) But the user shouldn't have to ever think about what the choices are, or have to stop to figure out how to properly interpret the text in the box. It's not about reading comprehension. It's about presenting a choice as clearly as possible. Verb-labeled buttons make the choices as stark as possible, so the user can spend his time weighing which choice is better, instead of working out what the heck the choices actually are.
Not nearly as confusing as why everyone insists on perpetuating the Yes/No/Cancel paradigm. I don't see why no one else is adopting the new Apple-style verb-based dialog buttons.
You're right on the money about just what a good idea it is. Ideally, you should be able to get the jist without even reading the main text. It's more efficient, as well as being less prone to error. But it's not exactly "new". It was one of the founding principles of the Macintosh interface in 1984, and it was one of those little gems of an idea that they got exactly right. It's still enshrined in the (ageing) official Mac Human Interface Guidelines.
To paraphrase a cool flash from last fall: "Are you sure you don't want to not decertify your non-vote for someone other than John Kerry?" Yes/No vs. Vote for Kerry/Change Vote
The problem, of course, is that travel at relativistic velocities is fairly pointless. By the time you get anywhere, everything has changed. You cannot build or maintain a civilization over interstellar distances, outside of a very small volume of space, if limited to light speed comms and slower than light travel.
Pointless only for biological beings with our infintesimally short lifespans and ridiculously high metabolic rates. For beings - biological or, even-better, non-biological - that have adapted themselves to a more cosmically appropriate pace of life, it may be quite practical. I mean, what's 100,000 years out of the lifespan of a star? About equivalent to 45 days out of the lifespan of human civilization.
Ahh, I thought it was needed, seeing as you usually use 's to indicate possession... Bloody English, too many stupid contradictions, plus it never was my strong point really. At least I don't usually get Their / There / They're mixed up anymore.:-)
It's not really a contradiction. Think of it as "order of operations" instead. Contraction takes precedence over possession. "It's" might be the proper form for either the contraction or the possessive, but contraction takes precedence and possessive is relegated to "its".
A more general way to think about it is to realize that no pronouns use the apostrophe for their possessive forms. Mine, yours, her/hers, his, its, our/ours, their/theirs... The anachronistic reason for this general exception to the "'s" rule may well have been to reduce the confusion of contracted "_ is" forms, which are very commonly used with pronouns.
A a percentage of GDP, we were spending more than five times as much in the mid-60s as we are today. The equivalent would be spending about $100B/year today. Imagine what we could do with $100B/year devoted to space exploration and off-world settlements...
Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO) gave at Yale University to the Graduating class of 2000. What follows is a transcript of the speech delivered by Ellison at Yale University last month:
I was at that graduation, and our Class Day speech was a modestly unmemorable one by Bob Woodward. Oh well. It was at least better, if less memorable, than the "if I can become President with a C-average, so can you" speech given the following year. Yale drop-outs don't do start-ups, anyway - they become (vice-)President.
Actually, nobody gave a shit until USB support was added to Windows. Microsoft added USB support in Windows 98 (and to a lesser extent, in Windows 95 OSR2). Both of which were released much earlier than the iMac.
Wow. That universe you live in has some funky space-time relationships if June 25, 1998 is "much earlier" than May 7, 1998.
No one gave a shit about USB until the iMac created a market for USB peripherals. It was still several years before it started appearing on most new PCs, thanks to Intel's chipsets - yet most consumer PC's to this day ship with non-USB mice and keyboards. This is exactly why Intel wanted to partner with Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
I put the term "fundamentalist" in quotes because it just doesn't quite seem to fit in that situation. Abolitionists were definitely religiously motivated, and were zealous about how their faith inspired their politics. Yet they were all for changing what had been the status quo for all recorded history, and the Bible certainly doesn't condemn slavery. Many of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement a century later were similarly inspired by a deep faith. There must be a better term than "fundamentalist" for such folks.
Maybe "fundamentalist" has just been tainted by modern association with strict sex & gender codes, instead of other teachings about, for example, social justice. Jesus was a (little-c) communist after all, among other things.
IANAL, but Wikipedia's recap of the case says that Universal asserted that time-shifting was illegal, and as this was the primary use of the VCR, Sony should be held liable. Sony's defense was that it was fair use, so the question of holding them liable was irrelevant - and the court concurred.
The moral of the story is, use the system the way it was designed to be used, and don't talk anonymous smack about something you have no clue about.
Let's keep in mind the split on the interstate-commerce pot decision and on, oh, EVERY recent civil liberties decision before we ask for "conservative" judges to protect civil liberties and strict constructionism.
The other respondant summarized the logic, but there's also the timeframe that some folks see as suggesting a link. Abortion was legalized in 1973. Crime rates started dropping around 1990. 1990 - 1973 = ?
I am curious, though, how this line of reasoning would be made to apply to the concurrent 60% drop in rapes and the 75% drop in car thefts... No one has put forth a convincing explanation for the amazing drop in all manner of crime in the 90s, but the abortion argument is as strong as any other so far, and has the added bonus of not being primae facie absurd.
a) Vietnamese PM stops in Seattle for a day on his way to DC
b) meets with Boeing and MS execs to talk trade, because he wants their help in lobbying Bush to support Vietnam's entry into the WTO
c) local human rights advocates - and much of the (sizable) Seattle Vietnamese community - protested his every move in Seattle
There. It's not exeptional or striking, it's just what happened. [shrug] I suppose it's not every day that a foreign head of government visits Seattle and kowtows to local business leaders. That seems like news. I think it is interesting, that of all the places in the US to visit before hitting the White House, the PM chose Boeing and MS in Seattle.
Longer explanation of why Yes/No just never works well:
The box needs to be long enough to explain what it wants to do and why it wants to do it. For example, "Do you want to install 100 dpi X11 fonts?" makes absolutely no sense in isolation. Why is the computer asking me such an arcane question? You have to add the reason, like the GP did: "Your screen's fonts are of a really low resolution." For non-obvious questions like this, you also should explain why you might or might not want to choose either option: "Do you want to install 100 dpi X11 fonts? This will make the fonts look better, but you may want to not install the fonts to save disk space." Altogether, this makes a well-written and informative box, but it's long. Yes/No doesn't work after a paragraph. What part are you saying "Yes" to, anyway? But with verb-labeled buttons, it's instantly obvious. You can read and understand the text, and then don't need to waste any more time understanding which button does what. It's instantly, idiot-proofily obvious. That's good interface design. Yes/No works, barely, when the entire box is one statement, like "Do you want to save changes before quitting?" But even then, verb boxes are more efficient. With Yes/No, you need to read the whole thing very carefully, as carefully as the font example above, to make sure you aren't screwing yourself by instinctively pressing "Yes". If the buttons were labeled "Save" and "Don't Save", you can safely skim the box, recognize it's the same as always, and know that "Save" will do exactly that. Little things like that separate a good interface from an infuriating pile of slag.
It's not that the user shouldn't think about what the choices will do. Of course he should. That's the whole point of the box, to present options. (One of the repliers obviously misinterpeted your post in this way.) But the user shouldn't have to ever think about what the choices are, or have to stop to figure out how to properly interpret the text in the box. It's not about reading comprehension. It's about presenting a choice as clearly as possible. Verb-labeled buttons make the choices as stark as possible, so the user can spend his time weighing which choice is better, instead of working out what the heck the choices actually are.
To paraphrase a cool flash from last fall:
"Are you sure you don't want to not decertify your non-vote for someone other than John Kerry?"
Yes/No
vs.
Vote for Kerry/Change Vote
A more general way to think about it is to realize that no pronouns use the apostrophe for their possessive forms. Mine, yours, her/hers, his, its, our/ours, their/theirs... The anachronistic reason for this general exception to the "'s" rule may well have been to reduce the confusion of contracted "_ is" forms, which are very commonly used with pronouns.
A a percentage of GDP, we were spending more than five times as much in the mid-60s as we are today. The equivalent would be spending about $100B/year today. Imagine what we could do with $100B/year devoted to space exploration and off-world settlements...
"Seventh year" student, and only just got a Master's this past year? I feel for you, man...
No one gave a shit about USB until the iMac created a market for USB peripherals. It was still several years before it started appearing on most new PCs, thanks to Intel's chipsets - yet most consumer PC's to this day ship with non-USB mice and keyboards. This is exactly why Intel wanted to partner with Apple.